Dynamic view-dependent simplification for polygonal models

Presents an algorithm for performing view-dependent simplifications of a triangulated polygonal model in real-time. The simplifications are dependent on viewing direction, lighting and visibility, and are performed by taking advantage of image-space, object-space and frame-to-frame coherences. A continuous level-of-detail representation for an object is first constructed off-line. This representation is then used at run-time to guide the selection of appropriate triangles for display. The list of displayed triangles is updated incrementally from one frame to the next. Our approach is more effective than the current level-of-detail-based rendering approaches for most scientific visualization applications where there are a limited number of highly complex objects that stay relatively close to the viewer.